Originally posted on WordPress.com News:We’re thrilled to announce that, starting today, WordPress.com Business users can connect their sites to their online stores. With three leading ecommerce partners to choose from — Ecwid, Shopify, and ShopLocket — you can showcase,…

Originally posted on Hunter Walk:According to AngelList there are 1,530 organizations listed as “incubators.” Even assuming several hundred of these are using the broadest definition of the word to describe themselves, it’s an incredible number. Many (the majority?) are…

I can’t thank you enough for the Subscriptions plug-in. It’s really making a dream come true and taking my business to the next level. – Sean A year ago today, WooThemes released Subscriptions. At the time, I’d been developing Subscriptions … Continue reading →

A visualisation of the last 2 years worth of SVN commits to the WordPress code base (as used in my WordCamp Sydney presentation). Checkout the slides here. Inspired by Jon Cave’s visualisation for WordPress 3.1. Built using Gource.

It was a great morning presenting at WordCamp Sydney. Thanks to everyone in the audience who allowed me talk about my three favourite topics – WordPress, the future & Deloreans. View the 2 years of WordPress Code visualisation here.

PayPal makes it possible to accept payments via just a few pieces of HTML on your site with its Website Payments Standard service. This service includes a Subscriptions button to sell products or services with recurring payments. The trouble is, … Continue reading →

If you’re in Australia (or Australasia) and work with WordPress, you should get along to WordCamp Sydney 2012. Australia had 2 WordCamps last year – Melbourne & Gold Coast. Both of which were fantastic events full of fun and learning … Continue reading →

Tacking a post_type parameter to any search URL in WordPress filters the search results by a post type. For example: http://example.com/?s=speak+easy&post_type=events Will return only events which include the terms speak and easy. But when setting the post_type parameter to page, something unusual happens. … Continue reading →

When publishing a post on WordPress.com these days, authors receive a new sidebar alongside their post. The most interesting feature in this sidebar is a game-like progress bar. Arbitrary goals are now being set on WordPress.com to encourage blogging. Publish … Continue reading →

The Greeks used fire beacons at the time of the Trojan War, in the twelfth century BC. A bonfire on a mountaintop could be seen from watchtowers twenty miles distant, or in special cases even farther. … The meaning of … Continue reading →

Early on, Graham envisioned this network as a “replacement for the traditional corporation.” “You know what’s great about the YC network? It gives the benefit of being part of a large company without being part of a big company,” Graham … Continue reading →

WordPress 3.1 introduced the best new feature I failed to notice – built-in support for filtering posts by multiple taxonomies. For a post index or custom post type archive, instead of being constrained to queries for one taxonomy like this: … Continue reading →

One step closer to the plot from Cory Doctrow’s Makers becoming reality.

At the center of every startup is a secret. A secret is not an unknown. Rather, it’s something just not widely believed to be achievable or feasible. In other words, it’s an insight. Exploiting that secret should be the aim of every entrepreneur. Leveraging the secret means disruption and ultimately success.

For legions of middle-class Chinese women — and for those who aspire to their ranks — solar protection is practically a fetish, complete with its own gear. This booming industry caters to a culture that prizes a pallid complexion as a traditional sign of feminine beauty unscathed by the indignities of manual labor. There is even an idiom, which women young and old know by heart: “Fair skin conceals a thousand flaws.”

With the pursuit of that age-old aesthetic ideal at odds with the fast-growing interest in beachgoing and other outdoor activities, Chinese women have come up with a variety of ways to reconcile the two. Face masks like Ms. Yao’s have taken this popular beach town by storm.

And:

“A woman should always have fair skin,” she said proudly. “Otherwise people will think you’re a peasant.”

Two-year-old Emma was born with a rare disease called arthrogryposis that makes it so she can’t raise her arms without assistance. Through the use of 3D printing, a Delaware hospital created a mobile plastic exoskeleton that now allows Emma to use her arms for many things.

3D printing ensures that a new exoskeleton can be created if Emma breaks or outgrows it. Emma is now on her second 3D-printed jacket and calls the device her “magic arms.”

The video was created by 3D printing business Stratasys, which recently merged with Objet in a $1.4 billion deal. A Stratasys 3D printer was used to create Emma’s jacket.

This announcement from Brightcove should trigger excitement in any front end dev. Running web content on the Apple TV is something I’ve personally dreamed of for a while now. Unfortunately comments indicate that the free version is essentially just a teaser, and most of the cool functionality remains behind a $99/month paid service. Ninety nine bones. Every month.

No thanks. I’ll wait until Apple offers it natively.

The proportion of businesses that reported receiving orders via the internet increased by 13% to 28%. Half or more of the businesses in the wholesale trade and manufacturing industries reported receiving orders online (52% and 50% respectively). The retail industry came in sixth place (35%). Businesses reporting a web presence increased from 40% to 43%.

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.

The story of every company begins with a clever hack. Pick any company, read its history, and I’m pretty sure there will be a well-documented origin story that will define its beginning and involves someone building something new and possibly of unexpected value.

What isn’t documented is the story of every moment before where everyone surrounding the hacker asked, “Why the hell are doing you that?”, “Why would you take the risk with so little reward?”, or “Why are you wasting your time?”

What’s not documented are the nine spectacular failures the hacker survived before they built one success.

In the future, we’ll see more of the opposite: everyday objects that already exist (like glasses) or spaces (like a room) that have technology built into them. As the functionality of gadgets becomes built into these everyday objects, the gadgets themselves start to become irrelevant.

The fall in the prices for these units is part of what is so stunning and promising about these devices. MakerBot is now selling fully assembled units of its Thing-O-Matic 3D Printer (gotta love the names for these things) for just $2,500. eMAKER had a special promotional offer of just $475 for kits of its Huxley RepRap. And a new entry called the Ultimaker is apparently more compact and faster than the Thing-O-Matic, can print larger objects and sells for $1,700 plus shipping. Wohler Associates, a consulting firm that tracks additive manufacturing, foresees that 3D printers costing only $75 or so could be making children’s toys in a few years.

Yet Wohler also questions whether fabbers will really become common home appliances any time soon: even if the price seems right, most consumers may not have the skills or interest sufficient to maintain and operate the devices—especially not if conventional manufacturers and fab-for-hire services can provide desired products more easily and at a desirable price.

Wired’s Danger Room interviews Marc Ambinder, a former reporter for The Atlantic and National Journal, who’s just written a book on JSOC, or Joint Special Operations Command. The whole interview is fascinating.

MA: Some of the tactics were as simple as equipping your tier-one operators — i.e., a Delta Force shooter or a SEAL Team Six demolition expert, the elite of the elite — with a camera. Instead of rounding up insurgents, bringing them to one area of a house, they’d have pictures of them exactly where they are, and take pictures what they have on them exactly. They’d keep them with their pocket litter until they were processed. And they’d send pictures back in real time to an intelligence fusion center. The main one in Iraq was in Balad but there were others. And you’d have analyst who could use many of various databases that JSOC had access to, and many that JSOC was building. The common metaphor was that you’re building the airplane as it’s taking off. You built all these databases for intelligence and had secret biometrics processes. There were teams of U.S. intelligence officers who were trying to get as many fingerprints, DNA samples and so forth of anyone in Baghdad as they could. The analysts would be able to create link analysis charts from them.

If you captured Abu So-and-So, you’d be able to say within a minute, “Hey, I know your uncle is this person, who we really want to get to. If you can tell me where this person is right now, we’ll give you a break and even let you go.” And often, that would be what Abu So-and-So would do, because it would be in his best interest. Within maybe 20 minutes, JSOC could launch a second raid targeting the uncle of Abu So-and-So.

About.com is crumbling, according to recent NYT earning reports. PaidContent’s Jeff Roberts writes, “About.com is in free fall. The New York Times revealed yesterday that its network of information sites suffered a 67% drop in profits and that revenues had fallen by a quarter.”

In this issue we launch a weekly section devoted to China. It is the first time since we began our detailed coverage of the United States in 1942 that we have singled out a country in this way. The principal reason is that China is now an economic superpower and is fast becoming a military force capable of unsettling America. But our interest in China lies also in its politics: it is governed by a system that is out of step with global norms. In ways that were never true of post-war Japan and may never be true of India, China will both fascinate and agitate the rest of the world for a long time to come.

Missed calls are being incorporated into mobile apps and services as a standard type of messaging like a text or an answered call itself. For example, an Indian cloud telephony service provider startup called KooKoo has been working with a Bangalore-based company to create an information market based around missed calls. If you want to know the latest weather, the latest Groupon-style deal, or the real-time bus schedule, you can send a missed call to the designated number and get an automated or manual voice call back with the answers you need.

(Via GigaOm)

“It’s one part foursquare and four parts onesquare,” Mr. Lodwick said.

the same gene, Pax6, which affects part of the brain associated with approach-related behaviours (the left anterior cingulate cortex, if you really want to know) also induces tissue deficiencies in the iris.

This week in the magazine, Alec Wilkinson writes about Ashrita Furman, “the world’s leading practitioner of a pursuit that is known as Guinnessport—the undertaking of challenges designed to get a person into an edition of Guinness World Records. He has set more world records than anyone ever has: three hundred and sixty-seven.” This clip is from the forthcoming documentary “The Record Breaker,” which follows Furman as he trains for new record attempts.

There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead.

In 2003 around 16,500 students applied … for places on computer science courses. By 2007 that had fallen to just 10,600, and although it’s recovered a little to 13,600 last year, that’s at a time in major growth in overall applications, so the percentage of students looking to study the subject has fallen from 5% to 3%.

General managers submit weekly reports, measuring factors like traffic and customer satisfaction. Every quarter, teams assess their priorities under an Intel-pioneered system called “objectives and key results.” And Mr. Pincus, a professed data obsessive, devours all the reports, using multiple spreadsheets, to carefully track the progress of Zynga’s games and its roughly 3,000 employees.

We’re introducing a method that lets you opt out of having your wireless access point included in the Google Location Server. To opt out, visit your access point’s settings and change the wireless network name (or SSID) so that it ends with “_nomap.” For example, if your SSID is “Network,” you‘d need to change it to “Network_nomap.